Nigeria

Nigeria

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HEA Urban Baseline Report

Post date

Thursday, 11 May, 2017 - 17:02

Document Type

Tools and Guidance

Content Themes

Resilience, Livelihoods

Sources

Save the Children, USAID

The Household Economy Approach (HEA) was developed in the early 1990s by Save the Children-UK in order to assist humanitarian practitioners in predicting short-term changes in a population’s access to food. It is a livelihoods-based framework for analysing the way households gain access to the things they need to survive and prosper. This focus on access was derived from Amartya Sen’s entitlement theory which suggested that famines occur not as a result of an absence of food itself, but from people’s inability to obtain access to food. HEA begins with an understanding of how households gain access to income and food, and how they spend their income. Central to the methodology of HEA is the notion that without knowing how households live normally, it will not be possible to understand nor quantify how they will be impacted by a shock or hazard. In essence, HEA enables the practitioner to understand how many people will need how much assistance, where, and for how long.